Sample Passwordless Configuration

This is the configuration I use with samba 4 for easy passwordless filesharing with family on a home network. Change any options needed to suit your network (workgroup and interface). I'm restricting it to the static IP I have on my ethernet interface, just delete that line if you don't care which interface is used.

If you're basing your firewall upon Arch Linux's Simple Stateful Firewall, just substitute the INPUT chain for the correspondent TCP and UDP chains.

Adding network shares using KDE4 GUI

How to configure the folder sharing in KDE4. Simple file sharing limits user shared folders to their home directory and read-only access. Advanced file sharing gives full semantics of Samba with no limits to shared folders but requires su or sudo root permissions.

Discovering network shares

If nothing is known about other systems on the local network, and automated tools such as smbnetfs are not available, the following methods allow one to manually probe for Samba shares.

This shows which folders are shared and can be mounted locally. See: #Accessing shares

Remote control of Windows computer

Samba offers a set of tools for communication with Windows. These can be handy if access to a Windows computer through remote desktop is not an option, as shown by some examples.

Send shutdown command with a comment:

$ net rpc shutdown -C "comment" -I IPADDRESS -U USERNAME%PASSWORD

A forced shutdown instead can be invoked by changing -C with comment to a single -f. For a restart, only add -r, followed by a -C or -f.

Stop and start services:

$ net rpc service stop SERVICENAME -I IPADDRESS -U USERNAME%PASSWORD

To see all possible net rpc command:

$ net rpc

Block certain file extensions on samba share

Samba offers an option to block files with certain patterns, like file extensions. This option can be used to prevent dissemination of viruses or to disuade users from wasting space with certain files: